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From an article by Eric Hammer-Lahav:

Man, that’s dead right. I login to Facebook about once a month, only to find a long list of weird one-sentence posts that don’t make much sense. I suppose they’d be more sensible if I was tuned in daily to the musings and random mutterings of these long-lost friends, but honestly it’s not that interesting to me.

Yesterday I took time off work (part of my “gradual retirement” plan) and spent some quality time with Kyra. We had lunch, ran some errands, and then decided to tie-dye some shirts.

It started out in the garage, soaking white t-shirts in water and soda ash (?) and then pouring dye on them.

After we finished, we bagged the dyed clothes and let them sit for about 16 hours. This afternoon we pulled out the bags to see what our creations turned out to be.

It was sort of like opening a Christmas gift– we had no idea whether the shirts would look like a mess of color or wicked cool. As it turned out, some were cool:

But some were kind of… uhh…

And the socks? Let’s not talk about the socks, except to say that tie-dyed socks aren’t nearly as cool as they might seem.

So now all of the goods are sitting on the trampoline drying in the sun. Then we have to wash them and hope the colors don’t bleed or fade too badly, and finally have some fun new shirts to wear.

I hate Drupal caching.

Today: the first– and last– photo of the Space Shuttle docking at the International Space Station.

Never before has such a photo been taken, and since the shuttle fleet is being retired this year, it won’t happen again. Kind of a shame. I’m not too broken up about the end of the shuttle legacy, but I feel like we’re at the dawn of the commercial space race and in the next few years we’re going to see some pretty cool stuff like this.

Tonight was the GRU summer ultimate league draft. As always it was a lot of fun picking players for my team this year. This is my twelfth year in GRU and it’s always an awesome part of my summer. I’ve been a team captain for many years, but decided last summer to take a break and let someone else run the show. As it turned out, I found that I missed it so this year I volunteered as a captain again.

Once again I asked the lovely and talented Brenda Gallagher to be my co-captain. I played with her my first year in GRU, back in 1999, and I’ve been on her team five times since then. That’s pretty rare considering the number of people in the league and the turnover every year as old-timers “retire” and new players join up. But I love playing with her, and this will be our third season captaining together.

Here’s a shot of Brenda last year as she writes our team cheer:

At the end of every game each team writes and performs a cheer for the other team. Win or lose, we sing a goofy song or write a poem or limerick or just come up with something witty and complimentary. Yeah, it sounds like something you’d see in the six-year-old tee-ball league, but it’s actually a lot of fun and completely embodies the spirit of GRU– and ultimate in general. We’re out there to have a good time with friends on a beautiful Colorado summer evening.

I can’t wait.

Yay, the PATRIOT Act has been renewed for four more years. Thanks, President Obama, for keeping your campaign promises to start rolling back that monstrous legacy of the Bush administration…

I run an email server for hundreds of people. I can’t even count the number of times I get requests like this:

No, I can’t “dial back” the firewall. Stop asking.

I just met up with my friend Rick, who works at Google, and he gave me a tour of the new office in Boulder. Apparently Google is going gangbusters on hiring staff and ramping up for some big initiatives, so they’re expanding their Boulder presence.

In addition to the cool tour, he gave me a geniune Chrome frisbee he bought at headquarters in Mountain View. He said he saw it and knew he needed to buy it for me.

It’s even a regulation 175g UltraStar. Awesome. Thanks, Rick!

Today was opening day for Pirates 4: On Stranger Tides so Laralee and I trucked down to the theater to see it. I misread the showtimes so when we arrived the only show at that time was the IMAX 3D version. We sucked it up and paid an extra three bucks per ticket for the IMAX Experience.

As it turns out, the IMAX Experience can best be summed up with the one word sucked. There was some problem with the projector at the theater, and the first five minutes of the movie were eye-wrenching. They stopped playing it and apologized, telling all of us that they had to recalibrate the projector. We enjoyed about ten minutes of colored dots and boxes (none of which were in 3D, interestingly) and then they cranked it up again.

No joy. It still made you want to cross your eyes like you were staring at one of those 3D posters. They stopped and rewound it (question: how do you “rewind” a digital movie?) and said everything was ready to go. We got to watch all of the trailers again– oddly, the trailers worked very nicely in 3D. But when the movie started for the third time, I asked Laralee if it was really fixed, or if nothing had changed. She concurred nothing had changed, and by this point we were almost an hour after the movie was supposed to start.

We went out to the lobby and asked if we could watch a non-3D version which happened to be starting then, and they agreed. They gave us some coupons for free soda (small) and popcorn (also small), and we headed over to watch the same set of trailers a third time. Note to self: Zookeeper looks idiotic.

The movie worked fine in old-fashioned 2D, and turned out to be pretty good. Afterward we received two passes for a free show and they were going to refund our thirty bucks but apparently “the computer won’t let you” if the show itself has ended, so they handed us two more passes.

In the end, I guess we ended up with three movies for the price of one, and about four hours in the theater. At least the movie didn’t suck. You can’t complain about Penelope Cruz as a pirate…

Sarah’s husband Grant is turning 40 next week so she’s asking everyone she knows to send him a birthday card. I went to the store last night hoping to score a sweet Hannah Montana one, but when I saw this I knew it was the right one.

Wow, that Edward is such a dreamboat. I hope Grant likes the card.